


The Quicksand of Reason

by linaerys



Category: Inception
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-08-08
Updated: 2010-08-08
Packaged: 2017-10-21 06:53:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,894
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/222171
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/linaerys/pseuds/linaerys
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>You’re already going to wake up; you’re already going to fall. You just need a kick.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	The Quicksand of Reason

_Edinburgh, Present Day._

With Cobb, they always had perfect discipline, splitting up after a job, coming together again when Cobb or one of his agents left a message. “After the job is over, we don’t know each other,” he always said.

It changed when Ariadne was in charge. Arthur objected, of course, but he joins them too after a simple, one-level extraction that leaves them in Edinburgh at 2am, coming in after the last train is gone. None of them want to sleep again so soon.

Eames never enjoys Edinburgh, or most of Scotland. It has too much countryside, and Edinburgh looks like something out of Ariadne’s architectural nightmares. Eames has to look at his chip more often than he ought to know he’s not dreaming. He knows he’ll be running down a steep stair-cased close in his next dream.

They meet in the old _Scotsman_ headquarters, now turned into a fine dining restaurant and bar with pretensions at class. But the flaming cocktail on the menu and the pale-eyed loiterers at the bar give it away. Unsavory characters come here, so the team is right at home.

It’s after hours, and the bar isn’t letting anyone new in. Maybe a policeman would mind the low lights over the tables, the murmurs coming from within, but Eames bets they’ve been paid not to care.

Ariadne’s cool fingers on his wrist shake him out of counting exits and doors. “How does one become a forger, Mr. Eames?” she asks. He doesn’t know if it’s the middle of a conversation they’ve all been having, or if she has simply chosen this moment to ask.

She’s the newest of them all, but she has a sixth sense for ferreting out things people wishes she wouldn’t. She will be one of the best extractors in the world. Better than Cobb.

“It’s not a pleasant story,” says Eames.

Ariadne’s fingers are still there, where the pulse meets the skin. “No secrets,” she says. It’s shorthand for their code, since Cobb left. You may have your secrets, but nothing that endangers the team. It’s uncomfortable, and overly intimate, but it works.

“Perhaps you should call him ‘doctor’,” says Arthur, a hint of a smile quirking the corner of his mouth. He takes a sip of his scotch. Highland Park. Eames taught him that.

“She could,” says Eames, “but I’m not a doctor anymore. You could ask Arthur. He knows the story as well as I do.” Ariadne looks interested, so he continues. “If I were still a doctor, I couldn’t tell the story. Doctor-patient confidentiality. But I’ve come a long way from worrying about things like ethics. Do you mind, Arthur? Shall I tell our story?”

“If you must,” says Arthur. “I have nothing to hide.”

“Very well.” Eames cocks his head at Arthur. “He led me into this life of crime. Seduced me, if you will.”

Ariadne smiles and sputters, “He? Arthur? Seduced _you_?”

Eames traces his gaze down Arthur’s face, over the flat mouth, to the collar, loosened slightly. The tie is still knotted, the top button still done. His jacket hangs on the hooks above their booth, and his sleeves are rolled up, exposing the golden tan of his forearms. His vest molds tailor-perfect to his waist, wrinkling slightly as he leans forward.

Eames licks his lips. “You may have noticed, my dear, that our Arthur is quite an attractive man.”

Arthur rolls his eyes. Eames sits back and rests his arm on the wooden rail above the seats, behind Yusuf’s shoulders. Yusuf smiles uneasily.

“Dr. Eames, yes, I was,” he says. “I had a Ph. D. in Psychology. I did my dissertation on dream therapy. It was a young science then—”

“Developed for the military,” Arthur cuts in. Eames can hear the stamp of boots in his words, echoing upward through his mind from the dreams they shared.

“She knows,” says Eames. “She’s a fast learner, just like I was. I did my post-doc at Cambridge, and had a small practice on the side. Students, mostly, who were willing to experiment.”

  
 _Cambridge, 199-_

They were all the same, his students. Gay boys with mummy issues, over-achieving girls with daddy issues, closeted boys with daddy issues, angry girls with mummy issues.

For a refreshing switch, this one had a mother who had bullied her like a father, and a father who nurtured and sheltered her like a mother. In her dreams, her mother sometimes looked like Margaret Thatcher, and sometimes wore the outsized muscles of a body builder. Almost every projection was some aspect of the woman who had shaped this girl.

In the dream, the muscular woman shouts at the girl, “You’re worthless, you’re weak. I despise you.” In the dream, the girl begs for her love, but even if the girl’s true mother has love to give, the projections do not.

When they wake, Eames asks her what she remembers. There are fragments that Eames helps her recall, and she leaves his office crying bitter tears. She’s attempted suicide before, but not since they started the dream treatments. In his notes, Eames calls her Niobe.

His next patient is a new one, a slim young man who wears a three piece suit that fits as if molded to him. It curves over his ass like—

 _Edinburgh, Present Day._

“Eames,” Arthur’s voice, the flat monotone he’s perfected, cuts into Eames story. “Stay on track.”

“I was. You seduced me, remember?” He holds Arthur’s gaze until Arthur breaks it, shaking his head, an unwilling smile curving his lips. “You know, I’ve always wondered if it was you who gave me the final push, the kick, if you will. You are good at that.”

“Tell your story,” says Ariadne.

“I should mention,” Eames continues, “I had a bit of a gambling problem in those days.”

Arthur makes a noise. “Those days?”

“These days I can cover my debts. So it’s not a problem, is it?”

Arthur says something indecipherable under his breath, which Eames chooses to ignore. “I was over-confident. I liked the thrill. Where was I? Oh yes, Arthur, in my office.

“He spends a fortune on those suits, you know. Hong Kong, Saville Row. That’s a lot of vanity. Is it about pride in the firm body underneath, or is it something else? It made me wonder . . .”

 _Cambridge, 199-._

He is not a student, this new patient. He unbuttons his jacket to sit down in the chair opposite Eames’s. The chair and not the couch. This one is not yet ready to give up that advantage to Eames.

“My name is Arthur,” he says. “I want you to dream with me.”

His eyes flash up at Eames, and Eames is aware of an attraction, the depth of which he will not share when he tells this story in a bar in Edinburgh, many years hence. The teasing is one thing; he enjoys making Arthur squirm, but buried underneath, there is a truth he doesn’t want to share with the Arthur of now. The truth that you’re already going to wake up; you’re already going to fall. You just need a kick.

The attraction makes him uncomfortable; Eames, who is used to being the beloved, not the lover, attraction enough to make him think he should send Arthur to another psychologist and meet him instead in a bar, take his measure over drinks—or perhaps not, perhaps measure has already been taken and received—and spend a torrid weekend in Eames’s flat. Eames licks his lips, thinking of undoing this Arthur’s tie.

Arthur is waiting for an answer.

“I don’t dream with any of my patients unless they’ve been in treatment for at least a year. It’s too dangerous otherwise. Why do you want to dream with me?” A question. When in doubt ask a question, and keep the session going on your terms.

“The military created this technology—” Arthur begins.

“The American military used this technology to train its soldiers, and how did that work?” He isn’t talking to Arthur as a patient now. He needs to get this back on track.

“The soldiers went crazy. Swore they couldn’t dream normally anymore. Some couldn’t even sleep. Some killed each other, and themselves,” says Arthur, in a monotone that should tell Eames something.

“Some of them killed each other,” Eames adds.

“The drugs have gotten better since then,” says Arthur.

“It’s an intimate thing, sharing a dream,” says Eames. “I would have to trust you.”

“It takes a year to build trust?” Arthur asks.

“It hasn’t failed me so far,” Eames answers.

**

The story seems sordid, unimaginative, when he tells it later. He was shaken by Arthur, and so he goes where he always goes when he is shaken, or bored, or can’t sleep. It’s a back room poker game, where they know him. Later in life he will switch to roulette, for its purity, but now poker suits him. Texas Hold ‘Em, where it is all about the opponents.

Perhaps he fails because while he can read them, they can read him too, all too easily. Perhaps it’s because reading people is different from reading cards. Perhaps it is because he has gotten used to failing here, and so a drop in the bucket of loss doesn’t feel that bad. He makes his payments on time.

**

Dreams are harder for Eames to find than they used to be. It is a side effect of too much shared dreaming. The drugs suppress his subconscious so he doesn’t bring his own projections into his patients’ dreams. But he needs the projections, needs to find them within his own mind and confront them, or he can’t be much of a psychologist.

Arthur is in his dream that night, which is oddly literal for Eames. He was an imaginative child, and his dreams usually tend toward the macabre and deeply symbolic. He hasn’t known Arthur long enough for him to show up as himself, and even dreaming, Eames wonders who Arthur really represents to him.

They are walking in the rain toward a pub, together under Arthur’s big black umbrella, vast as the night sky. Once inside, it is warm enough to set Eames’s tweed steaming. Arthur shucks off his raincoat, and underneath is wearing another devastating suit, this one tan. The shirt is not quite white, but a warming cream, golden under the pub’s dim lights.

They’re at the table, pints of Guinness in front of them. “What do you do with your patients in their dreams?” Arthur asks.

“I watch them. I watch their projections. It helps me know what to talk with about them when they wake.”

“Don’t they think it’s odd, to see their shrink in their dreams?”

Eames makes a face at the insult, as he knows Arthur wants him to. “Lots of people dream about their psychologists.”

Arthur looks skeptical.

“I hide,” Eames admits. “That’s what my dissertation was about—how to hide in dreams, so they don’t wake up too soon.”

“Why hide? Why not just ask them what’s wrong?”

“I know what’s wrong,” says Eames. “The trick is to get the patient to know what is wrong, and change to fix it.”

“The patient has to want to change,” says Arthur flatly.

“See, you’re getting it.” Eames takes a sip of his Guinness. It tastes better than real life, creamy and cool, with no aftertaste at all.

“Do you ever pretend to be one of their projections?”

“Of course. That’s how I hide.”

Arthur leans forward. At some point during the dream he has shed his jacket, and his sleeves are rolled up, exposing smooth, muscular forearms. Eames wants to run a fingertip over them, grip them in his hands, feel if the flesh is as firm as it looks, see if under that cool exterior, Arthur is reacting to him the way he is reacting to Arthur.

And why not, it’s his dream? Arthur is not his patient.

“Do you ever pretend to be their mother, father, someone they need to confront?”

“No, that’s against everything—”

“Why? Because it would work too well?” Arthur’s voice goes hard.

Now Eames does grab his forearm, but in as much anger as lust. “That’s not what I do.”

“You could, though.”

He pulls Arthur against him in the booth. It’s his dream; the object of this masturbatory fantasy may be Arthur, but it’s still a projection, subject to Eames’s well trained will.

With the aid dream physics, which work so much better than the physics of real life, Eames finds himself on top of Arthur on their vinyl bench. The voices in the pub carry on with their dull murmur, oblivious to Arthur and Eames.

Arthur has his hands around the back of Eames’s head, pulling them together. They kiss hard and sloppy, lips opening, tongues and teeth together. Eames grinds against him until Arthur pushes him away. “No time,” says Arthur, throwing Eames off.

“Why not?” asks Eames petulantly. “It’s my dream.”

He wakes up hard, but without the desire to finish it off. His wrist prickles and itches from where the lead entered earlier today. He presses it with his thumb, knowing that scratching will only make it worse, and the sensation fades away.

**

The dream of Arthur stays with him. He finds it harder to hide himself in his patients’ dreams now, because he wants to _know_.

Therapy takes a long time; most of his patients will graduate before he can truly help them. If he could get them to confront their demons, their fathers’ and mothers’ projections grown hideous with repetition and neurosis, perhaps they could move on quicker. He could help them more.

**

Arthur comes to see him again. Eames makes a note to speak with his secretary. Arthur cannot be his patient, for a host of reasons.

“Only you can help me, Dr. Eames,” he says when he sits down. “What do you see, when you look at me?”

He shouldn’t answer. He wouldn’t answer, but Arthur is not his patient, and Arthur pushes his buttons as no one before or since ever has.

“I see a man who is hiding something underneath that flat voice, those tailored suits that he wears as a uniform,” says Eames.

Arthur doesn’t move a muscle, but Eames can _see_ ; this is what he does, who he is. “I see a soldier, a man in uniform still. I see a dream gone wrong. I see . . . they used to call it ‘shell-shock’, a much better term, I think, than Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

“God, ‘stress’, what an overused word.” Eames runs his hand through his hair. He wore it looser then. “I see a man whose dreams must be full of violence, and memories. Who keeps a tight lid over that, so no one will see inside. I see—”

“If you see all that,” asks Arthur, “will you help me?”

For a moment, Eames wants to say ‘yes’. For a moment is does not see a slim young man he’d like to fuck six ways from Sunday, but a mind—a soul—in pain.

“No,” he says. “It would be unethical. I am—” here he smiles, self deprecating “—quite attracted to you. I can give you a referral. But I should warn you, sharing your dreams would be dangerous. Whoever you work with will have to build up a trust relationship before they could go into your dreams.”

“I don’t have that kind of time,” says Arthur flatly.

**

Arthur meets him at his favorite pub a week later. He wears navy, not the warm tan from Eames’s dream, but he still looks good.

“Do you forgive me?” Eames gestures to the bartender for another drink.

“What are you having?” Arthur asks.

“Scotch. Highland Park. What would you like?”

“Laphroaig.”

Eames smiles archly. “Boring. Just like your suits.”

For a moment, an expression of boyish self-consciousness crosses Arthur’s features, before they settle into their usual flat, unreadable calm.

“What should I drink?” Arthur asks.

Eames slides his drink over. It’s a rich, peaty single malt. “It tastes like grave dirt,” says Arthur.

“Grave dirt? Oh, so you do have an imagination.”

“You know I have an imagination,” says Arthur. “Just like I know you don’t think my suits are boring.”

  
 _Edinburgh, Present Day._

“Here I shall draw a veil, for the sake of your virgin ears.” Eames grins at Ariadne, who rolls her eyes. No need to tell Yusuf and Ariadne that Arthur liked a long, slow fuck, that he had just as much control in bed as he seemed to everywhere else. That he put his clothes off carefully, but not sensually. That he had no such compunctions about Eames’s, ripping and popping buttons where he felt like it.

“I’m sure I’ve heard worse, but thank you,” she ays.

“I didn’t trust him enough to spend the night,” says Eames.

“You . . . two?” Ariadne looks from one to the other. “I suppose that explains a few things.”

“Yeah,” says Arthur. “I guess it does. Do I get to tell my side anytime soon?”

“When I’m done, darling,” Eames replies. “As in all things, we must take turns.”

Ariadne’s lips quirk with amusement. Eames half expects Arthur to leave now—wonders, even, why he hasn’t left already.

“There wasn’t much sleeping. I can tell you that much . . .”

 _Cambridge, 199-._

“The architects made the dreams we fought in,” Arthur tells him. “Forests, deserts, cityscapes. We took turns playing each side of a battle. Sometimes they lasted for months.”

“Brutal,” says Eames, but he is distracted. Arthur’s hair is just a bit mussed, falling forward over one ear. Eames brushes it back for him.

“Do you create the world of your patient’s dream?” Arthur asks.

“Yes.”

“Tell me what you create.”

Arthur is doing things to him now, cruel and tantalizing things, and his expression never changes.

“I build a house. What they don’t want to confront is always in the basement. I build a castle, and the thing that keeps them from changing is guarding the gate. I build a mirror, and they see the thing they hate most.”

Arthur doesn’t ask anything more that night.

**

Eames never plies him questions, and Arthur never appears in his dreams again. Eames is afraid to know the answers. Where does Arthur get the money that pays for his suits, for the wide and empty apartment overlooking the Thames? For the meals he buys Eames. The lobster dripping in butter. The glasses of scotch.

**

Eames dreams with Niobe again, watching her wander though a half constructed house. Within is a leering construction worker, with whom Niobe flirts for a moment. Then Eames feels her tap on his shoulder.

“Why do you turn your back to me?” she asks.

He turns and says, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be here.”

“Why, Mother? Why shouldn’t you be here? This is our house. You are building our house.” Niobe’s voice is hysterical.

In the dream is a mirror, of course, and Eames turns to see himself, wearing the nondescript flesh of Niobe’s mother, exactly as she looked in the picture Niobe showed him.

“No,” he says. “You are building _your_ house. It is your time now. But thank you for inviting me.”

“Do you like it, mother? Do you like my house?”

“Yes, darling. I do. You are doing a wonderful job. I am so proud of you. Won’t you show me around?”

Eames’s heart sinks when they wake, but Niobe’s tears are calm and accepting. At the next session her dreams are of more mundane things, frustrations with her classes, a professor who doesn’t take her seriously.

“It worked,” he confesses to Arthur, the only person he can tell. The pub is quiet tonight.

“Of course it did,” says Arthur. He isn’t dressed in a suit today, rather a slim fitting cloth jacket, heather gray t-shirt, black corduroy jeans.

“It’s wrong,” says Eames. “Professional boards on both sides of the Atlantic agree. It’s facile, manipulative.”

Arthur nods, as impassive as if Eames is speaking of the weather. “Now maybe you can help me.”

“I told you no.”

Arthur merely nods again.

  
 _Edinburgh, Present Day._

“Arthur sent a note, by messenger, saying he would be back in a couples months.” Eames sighs heavily. “And this is where it gets really sordid.”

Yusuf chuckles. “It wasn’t sordid already?”

“I’m glad you’re finding my moral dissolution amusing,” says Eames. But then he smiles quickly, to say it’s alright. The story is amusing now, even to him. What he does now isn’t very different from what he did then. The money is better. The work is quicker. He would have found his way here one way or the other.

“A man approached me, with a job offer. Alec, no last name needed. He wanted something from Niobe’s mind. Said she was witness to a crime he wanted punished. She wouldn’t have to testify—that wasn’t the kind of punishment he meant—but he needed certain details. And he would clear my gambling debts. If I didn’t . . . there were threats of violence, against me and her. I should have known. I probably did know.

“In her dreams I gave her a locker, under the bed in her dorm room. In it she put a bloody beating in a back alley, faces, names shouted out.

“I told the man, and he had her killed. And the next day I turned in my resignation and bought a one way ticket to Bangkok.

“A team of extractors found me, and offered me money for my work. At first I was their architect, but then they could see my real skill. My houses were sloppy. My faces weren’t.”

“No, they’re not,” says Ariadne. She turns her glass around in her hands. It’s empty now but for a few clinking ice cubes. “Did you get the help you needed?” she asks Arthur.

“You’d know if I hadn’t,” he answers, jaw tightening. “Have you ever seen one of my projections?”

She smiles her sad smile, pays the tab and goes up to her room. Yusuf makes a hasty exit as well. The sky is lightening over the eastern horizon. The sun rises early here in the summer.

He and Arthur are left in the booth alone.

“I seduced you,” says Arthur without inflection, but there is a question in it. “I could have told them another story, how we didn’t leave your flat for days, how I missed a job, and you lost yours. How when you found me again, we dreamed together for weeks. How you kept on disappearing. How you still do.”

“You were using me,” says Eames. “That’s alright. It happens.”

“I was. You helped me then. You wouldn’t before.”

“You had to ruin my career for that?” He shouldn’t still be angry about that. He’s made his peace, long since.

“I didn’t send Alec to you. That was . . . just luck.”

“Luck.” Eames shakes his head. A girl is dead, he could say, but he’s probably done worse since then. His misjudgment always pained him worse than her death.

“I always assumed. I guess you were just—”

Arthur puts a hand over Eames’s. He leans close so Eames can smell his aftershave, see the faint dusting stubble over his chin—it grew slowly, Eames remembered—and says, “I was just the kick.”

 _”Vanity is the quicksand of reason.” –George Sand_   



End file.
